The Apparatus relates generally to non-deleterious accelerated aging of wine and/or spirits. In earlier days, wine making was practiced in very low volume by a few masters who handed the craft from generation to generation. Recently, however, the wine business has burgeoned into a multimillion dollar industry which stretches around the world. Relatively new vineyards, such as Napa Valley and Australia, have joined the traditional ranks of those in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and the like. Even though, the demand for this commodity has increased multifold, the process by which the wine is made has remained pretty much the same. Thus, wineries have been forced to increase such things as vat volume, aging capacity, and the like. A prime limiting factor in further increasing production is the “aging time” which increases the time in inventory, thus increasing costs. Another factor is the expense of increasing the number of traditional wine barrels required to increase production.
In the making of many wines and spirits, it is usual to age the wine or spirits in, for example, wooden barrels. “Barrel aging” is a centuries-old practice to improve the characteristics, such as taste and mellowness of wine. Certain aging techniques are used to impart a flavor and “soften” the wine. Usually, for quality wines, the barrels are made of oak. One of the drawbacks of “barrel aging” is the time that it takes to naturally age the fermented beverage. In recent years, synthetic barrels made of materials having limited porosity (semi-permeable) have been used and oak wood chips added for flavor. Additionally, stainless steel vats have been used wherein aging is accomplished by micro-oxygenation. In micro-oxygenation, small bubbles of oxygen are passed through the wine. Wines, aged in this manner, are usually of less quality and can be over-oxygenated, spoiling the wine.
The aging process, although complex, is thought to involve oxygen induced chemical reactions, including polymerization of short chain phenols. After the initial fermentation, present understanding suggests that the aging process improves the wine by polymerization of these phenols with the involvement of oxygen. Thus, it is known that the infusion of oxygen through the walls of the barrel or semi-permeable container into the wine or spirits is an important aspect of the aging process. During this barrel aging process, water and alcohol are thought to diffuse out through the semi-permeable walls of the barrel and oxygen from the atmosphere diffuses in.
In the usual practice of aging wine in barrels, or in wine aging containers, the barrels or containers are placed in racks undisturbed (except for periodic sampling or topping off as evaporation of the water and alcohol depletes the liquid.) In some wineries, the barrels are turned to provide some agitation or mixing of the body of the wine. This has little effect on the convection into the reaction region, but favorably affects the diffusion profiles of the reactants in the aging process. Because the effect on aging rate is small and the effort is large, the turning of barrels is not done by many winemakers.
While exposure to oxygen during racking and aging in the barrel can be of benefit to the wine, excess oxygen can be deleterious and “sour” the wine. Thus, wines that are “corked” or have “turned” are examples of excess oxidation. Once a bottle of wine has been opened for some time, or if oxygen has seeped past a faulty cork, the oxidized wine will taste “off” and eventually sour. Therefore, accelerating aging by introduction of more oxygen has to be controlled to prevent deleterious excessive oxidation.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an apparatus or device for accelerating the time that it takes to age wine without deleteriously affecting the wine. In my parent application (Ser. No. 11/856,893, which is incorporated herein by reference) of which this application is a continuation-in-part, apparatus and methods were disclosed, for induced or “active” acceleration of the aging of wine by moving the wine within the container. In that application, it was disclosed that the aging as a chemical reaction occurs in a region near the interface of the inner container wall and the wine, called the “Reaction Region.” As a result, a concentration gradient of the products builds near the barrel wall which inhibits fresh wine reaching the reaction region. Thus, the rate of reaction (aging) is thought to be dependent on the concentration of the reactants at the reaction region. That application involved replenishing of fresh wine in the reaction region by active mechanical means, such as an impeller, for moving the wine interior the container. This process had traditionally been accomplished primarily by passive naturally occurring diffusion or natural convection within the standard wine barrel.
In my grandparent application (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,966,250, which is incorporated herein by reference), of which the parent application, as well as the instant application, are continuations-in-part, an apparatus and method were disclosed, for induced acceleration of the aging of wine by increasing the area of the interface between the wine and the atmosphere, wherein the rate of aging is expedited by increasing the volume of air within the area of wine interface by providing additional semi-permeable interface within the container. This interface area was disclosed as being increased well above that of conventional barrels by a number of apparatuses and techniques, all of which involved the introduction of additional apparatus into the container to carry air and/or the wine.
In that grandparent application, there were disclosed a number of methods and devices, for increasing the oxygen interface to volume ratio. In one embodiment, a plurality of spaced hollow semi-permeable tubes provided an interface wall between the wine and the atmosphere wherein the tubes were placed within the barrel such that oxygen could infuse through the walls of the tube into the wine or spirits to enhance aging.
Although, these active methods of increasing the ratio of this interface area (reaction region) to the volume of wine in the container proved effective in decreasing aging time, they greatly increased the cost of both the apparatus and the aging operation. In addition, such configurations are difficult to clean. However, the problem of “aging time” with purely passive methods is still problematic.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have a device for aging wine which was passive, i.e. did not require mechanical impellers or semi-permeable tubes through which oxygen (air) is delivered, thus accelerating the aging, while retaining the traditional costs of materials and operations of the time-honored wine making masters. These devices would be liquid tight semi-permeable containers which, for a given volume of wine, would allow for a faster non-deleterious softening (or aging) of the wine along with the economic advantages over prior art “barrel aging”.